


Welcome home, dearly beloved

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Brotherly Affection, Character Death Fix, Idiots in Love, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, M/M, Meet the Family, Past Drug Use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sleeping Together, Talking To Dead People, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 17:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20624903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: He was getting stronger, he knew that to be true, but he never expected to summon the love of his life in such a twisted turn of events.But now Dave was here, standing right before him, and Klaus wasn't quite sure what to do with himself, except that he needed to touch him. Kiss him. Love him.





	Welcome home, dearly beloved

He wasn’t sure when it happened.

It felt like just an ordinary day because it _was_ just an ordinary day. He had bickered with Ben and argued with Diego and danced with Allison and ignored Luther and stayed far away from Five and listened intently to Vanya rehearse.

So, if he thought back on it, there wasn’t anything different about his day.

He’d been sober for a while. He hadn’t been counting, because that sort of crap didn’t matter to him, but it had to have been a while if he had lost track, right? Anyway, he had been off the drug so long that he had pretty much forgotten what being high felt like. But he’d been a good boy and gone to his classes and spoken to the nice lady with the ugly glasses who didn’t believe a word he said so really he ended up turning his back to her and talking to Ben instead, which admittedly made him look as crazy as she thought he was, but he was going, ok?

Today must have been different. It must have been. He doesn’t know how it was, but it has to have been. There’s no other explanation.

One moment he’s sitting in the garden with his back against one of the ugliest trees that still had its leaves, basking in the warmth of the sunlight and practising his knitting. He wasn’t very good, not yet, but the desperate people at the rehab centre had told him that it helped to have a hobby, and he swore that by the end of the year he would have knitted at least one item of clothing. Maybe not for Luther, because his hands were huge before he became part-monkey, but maybe for Vanya, or Five with his child body, or-

He was just so focused on his task, the brightly coloured sting winding between his fingers, that he hadn’t noticed the shimmering chill of a ghost forming behind him, taking shape out of nothingness, until Ben made a small noise at the back of his throat. He’d just gotten so used to new ghosts forming that it didn’t seem any different, and he didn’t even look up from his task when he said, “Let me guess. There’s a ghost right behind me, isn’t there?” in true comedic, 'Scooby-Doo' fashion.

But it was when Ben didn’t answer that had Klaus finally looking up.

Klaus couldn’t really identify the look on his brothers face. Maybe fear, or horror, or maybe just plain and simple… awe? Whatever it was, it had Klaus immediately on edge, and he spun around to face the new ghost standing behind him, rudely close to him if he did say so himself, he liked his space-

He nearly lost consciousness right there and then.

He looked exactly as Klaus remembered him. Tan skin and crooked smile and eyes that glittered like gold, the scratchy layer of light stubble ghosting over his chin. Ben looked between him and Klaus, the dog-tags shinning on their necks and the love reflected in their eyes, and with a smile to himself, he fell back into the ether to give his brother a moment of privacy.

“Dave…” Klaus could barely form the letters over his lips. His whole body felt numb, from his fingers to his toes, and everything in between. “What…”

When Dave’s eyes fell on him, Klaus felt like the ground was dropping out from under him. He tilted his head in confusion. “Klaus? Baby?”

Klaus knew from experience that when ghosts developed, they showed up in the exact same way they died. Like with Ben- he wore the same clothes he died in, and Klaus wasn’t there when he died, so he could only assume that the wound that killed him was hidden snugly beneath his black jumper. Dave… he died in battle. He still wore his old uniform, speckled with the dried blood of his enemies, a giant hole in his chest from where the bullet shredded his torso inwards, his own blood still wet and gushing out from the wound.

It was really hard to look at. Klaus could still feel his blood coating his skin from when Klaus had tried in a futile effort to staunch the bleeding before the medical team arrived, the feeling of Dave’s limp body heavy in his hands from where Klaus had held him to his chest, the sound of unending gunfire echoing around the trenches and mingling with his desperate screaming ignored by most, using the brush to wash his hands and scrub them red-raw to get the feeling of blood off of his fingers, the cooling feeling of Dave’s lips against his own, devoid of all life and Klaus’s of live worth living-

But then Dave was there, right in front of him, toe-to-toe with Klaus, with his cold hands on his cheek. The air flew out of Klaus in a rush. “Babe?” Dave said, and there was laughter too it as if he found Klaus’s discomfort amusing.

“Is this a dream?” Was all Klaus could say. “I don’t usually get good dreams like this.”

Dave laughed and pulled his hands away from Klaus to look down at them. “I don’t know. I hope not. I haven’t had a dream in a very long time, and I hope I don’t start now, or this really will be some kind of punishment.”

“It can’t be,” Klaus almost sobbed. “You can’t be. I’ve been trying to summon you for so long, _so long_, and I thought that you just didn’t want to see me.”

“Didn’t want to see you?” Dave shook his head, a little shocked. “Why wouldn’t I want to see you? I’ve been trying to get back to you since the moment I was shot, but I was just… lost, stuck.” He put both his hands on Klaus’s cheeks, now, and held his face securely between his fingers. “You’re the most important thing in my life, freaky ghost powers and all. I have never loved anyone more than I’ve loved you.”

A glint of metal caught his eye, shining brightly under the sun, and Dave glanced down to the matching dog-tags around Klaus’s neck, old and familiar. He slid one hand off of Klaus’s cheek down to his neck and gently cradled the metal between his fingers. “You kept my dog-tags,” Dave laughed, a little surprised. “I thought that they were long gone.”

“I’ve never taken them off,” Klaus pressed his face into the hand still resting on his cheek. “It’s the only thing I was able to bring back with me, other than memories.”

Around Dave’s neck was a matching pair of dog-tags, but instead of them carrying his name and rank, they had Klaus’ emblazoned on them, and around Klaus’s neck were Dave’s own. It was a swap they did when they first started dating, and Dave was surprised to see that Klaus still had them. “I thought you would have taken them off by now. Found someone else. Moved on.”

“From you?” Klaus laughed through his tears. “The boy who swept off of my feet and taught me what love was? Not in a million years.” The smile on Dave’s face was infectious and Klaus could barely see it through the thick sheen of tears that refused to stop falling from his eyes. “I missed you,”

“Oh baby,” Dave reached his fingers around Klaus’s head to pull him in and kiss him softly on the forehead. “I missed you too. I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

Klaus couldn’t hold back the tears any longer and finally, just let them fall freely. “I am… so fucking glad to hear you say that. I thought the reason I couldn’t summon you or bring you back was that…” he took a deep breath. It had hurt him every time he thought about it, saying it out loud wasn’t any easier. “Because you didn’t want to see me again. Because you didn’t really love me. More of a ‘spur of the moment’ type thing.”

“Are you _insane_?” Dave looked aghast. He held Klaus’s face tighter, as if afraid he would blow away in the wind. “I have never loved anyone as I loved you. You’ve been the only thing on my mind since that day in the trench and every day before that since the night you fell into my tent from the sky. I’ve been searching for you for so long, Klaus. _So long._ It never even crossed my mind not to find you again, if only for a second, if only so I could tell you I loved you, one last time, or say goodbye. I never stopped looking for you. Never.”

“O-oh,” Klaus wasn’t sure what to say. “_Christ on a cracker_, Dave, I didn’t know you were a poet in your past life.”

“I was a soldier, actually,” Dave joked, and Klaus’s laugh came out choked on tears. Dave reached his thumbs up to gently rub away the unstoppable tears under Klaus’s eyes. “Did you really think I was only using you and that I didn’t actually love you? That it was all fake?”

Klaus swallowed back his retort. “Well, that’s usually how it tends to go. I kinda expect it at this point. I’ve uh, I’ve learned that it’s easier to expect the worst in people than to accept that they might not actually be all that bad.” He shrugged. “I come from a big family, and it’s a lot easier to hate them than it is to love them. I’m sure the same goes for me, as well.”

Snorting, Dave ghosted his breath over Klaus’s face, and he felt so alive that Klaus had to keep reminding himself that he was holding a spirit he left back in 1968. “So I’ve heard. Where _are_ these siblings of yours, by the way? I think it’s about time I gave them a piece of my mind.”

“Fuck those guys,” Klaus said with finality as he finally regained movement in his limbs and wrapped his arms tightly around Dave and pulled him roughly against his chest. Dave gasped in surprise, but leant into the touch, and held Klaus just as close. “Can you believe that you’ve been back for about 10 minutes now and I haven’t even kissed you yet?”

Dave shone Klaus that crooked smile that he loved so much before they were crashing their lips together and Klaus’s breath was knocked out of him all over again and he was seeing stars. At that moment, he realized that he had never been so happy to touch a ghost in his measly life.

* * *

“Guys,” Luther called out to the rest of his family as he looked out the window into the garden. “Klaus is being weird again.”

Diego snorted from where he was trying to clean blood out of his uniform, currently wearing an oversized shirt that Grace had found for him. “He’s always being weird.” He grunted. “You need to be more specific.”

As Luther continued to watch, Klaus continued to stand there, sobbing and shaking, and reaching towards the air. “Nope, I think you have to come and have a look for yourself. It’s too weird to explain.”

That got their attention and suddenly everyone was there, Five and Vanya and Allison and Diego with Luther, watching through the window as Klaus suddenly cradled his arms around nothing and yanked the air forward, kissing empty space with tears in his eyes as if his life depended on it. Allison sighed in resigned disappointment. “He’s probably taken something,” she said. “And he was doing so well, too.”

“Regardless,” Five said as he pressed his face closer to the window. “It’s strange, no matter what he’s done.”

“Maybe we’re just blowing it out of proportion,” Vanya said. “There’s probably a completely reasonable explanation that we’re just ignoring. We just need to ask him, that’s all.”

Diego looked at her, and with some effort, smiled at her. It had been a long while since he had been intentionally nice to Vanya. “Always looking on the bright side.” He smirked at Vanya’s blush.

Then Klaus turned around and started to walk towards the house with his hand outstretched and clasped around the air, one hand scrubbing tears off of his face, his make up all smeared. “Oh god, he’s coming in,” Luther said, pushing away from the window so hard that the wall creaked with the effort. “Let’s go before he catches us.”

“No,” Vanya said, backing away, annoyed. “I’m going to stay here and ask him what he’s doing. You can go anywhere you want. I’m not going.”

Reluctantly, the Hargreeve’s siblings waited in the foyer as Klaus moseyed up the lawn and pushed open the front door with his free hand, his other hand still firmly fixed in the air, laughing with tears in his eyes. “Oh,” he said abruptly when he realized they were waiting for him. “What the fuck do you lot want?”

Vanya and Diego were going to start gently, as their questions slowly and without judgement while Luther and Five just stood back and watched, but Allison wasn’t willing to wait for their peaceful interrogation to end before she started with her own line of rapid-fire questioning, and stepped forward with her hands on her hips. “Klaus,” she said sternly. “You know that we won’t judge and that we will love you no matter what, but we need to know what you’ve taken so we can figure out how long it will take to get you back on track.”

Luther winced. “Way to be blunt there, Allison.”

“Better to rip off the Band-Aid,” she retorted and turned back to Klaus, who just looked… lost.

He was looking back and forth between his siblings, confused, before finally lading back on Allison. “I literally have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Instead of letting Allison continue talking, Diego stepped forward and pulled her roughly back behind him. Klaus turned his very annoyed stare to Diego. “What she’s trying to say is that you’re holding hands with the air and look like you’re crying over nothing. It’s… kinda weird, Klaus, even for you.”

Klaus’s face immediately closed off. Beside him, Dave frowned and held his hand tighter. “Wow,” he said. “You really weren’t exaggerating when you were telling me how horrible they are to you.”

“I know,” Klaus replied. “Grade A pieces of shit right here.” He looked back at his siblings. “It’s Dave. You know, the guy that died in the war? The guy I haven’t shut up about for months?”

Luther looked sceptically in the empty space beside Klaus. “Right…”

Dave looked to Klaus. “Do they not know that you can talk to ghosts or…?”

“You know, babe, at this point I have no idea what’s going on,” Klaus said as he reluctantly let go of Dave’s hand and took a step forward. Dave reached for him, but at the look on Klaus’s face, didn’t approach. He knew that look. And he loved it. “So, what you’re telling me, is that you have no idea what’s going on right now?”

Five was looking frustrated. “Obviously not. Why else would be wasting our breath to ask you these meaningless questions?”

The glint in Klaus’s eye was back, and Dave bit his lip to hold back his grin as Klaus started to talk with his hands. “Let me get this straight. It’s entirely reasonable for you to accept that I can talk with our dear brother who is very much dead and that I can also interact with other ghosts on a daily basis, but the fact that I can interact with my dead boyfriend is too much for you fuckers to handle?”

Luther choked on his spit. “_Boyfriend_?”

Klaus levelled him with an unamused look. “Well, if we didn’t know that your skull is as thick as the rest of your body, we defiantly do now.” He turned back to Dave. “Can you believe these assholes?”

Smiling, Dave reached out and took Klaus’s hand again. “They’re just as bad as you said they were, honestly. I’d kick their ass if I still had a body.”

“Don’t worry, that’ll come later. Where’s Ben?” Klaus began walking past his siblings, with their shocked expressions and agape jaws hitting the floor, except for Diego who looked so proud he had tears in his eyes and Vanya, who looked like she wanted to say something. He paused in front of her. “Yes, my dearest sister who I love and adore?”

Licking her lips, Vanya tentatively took a small step forward and held out her hand. “Hi Dave,” she said quietly, a little awkwardly. “It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for loving my brother and making him happy.”

Blue light sparked under Klaus’s manicured fingernails as Dave reached his hand out, forgetting that he couldn’t touch her, but his hand made contact, and instead of empty space, the Hargreeves saw a shimmering yet very solid hand appear out of the ether and shake Vanya’s outstretched hand. Vanya almost jerked away.

“Right, well, now that that’s over with,” Klaus said, turning away. “Benny boy!”

Klaus reached for Dave’s hand and yanked him away and Dave followed him, laughing, and neither of them saw the expressions on the sibling's faces behind them. Diego was the first to speak when Klaus was out of earshot and the door had closed behind them. “I’ll be damned…”

* * *

Ben was waiting for them in Klaus’s bedroom, hanging upside down over the edge of the bed, reading a book, and he looked up when the door opened. “Oh, finally, you managed to get through them.”

“You heard that, huh?” Klaus said as he led Dave into the room, not wanting to let him go for a second.

“How could I not?” Ben snorted, sitting up and crossing his legs beneath him instead. “They’re very loud when they want to get a point across. They can be so stupid sometimes. How could they forget that their own brother can talk to ghosts that they can’t see? Almost as if Diego can’t throw knives and Vanya can’t control sound.”

Dave looked at Ben, a little relieved and yet a little surprised. “You look a lot nicer than the others.”

“The other ghosts?” Ben clarified. “It's because I’m Klaus’s favourite. You’re not looking too bad yourself,” he stuck an arm out and Dave took it with a lot less expended energy on Klaus’s part. Ghost-to-ghost contact must be easier than ghost-to-human contact. “You must be Dave.”

“Uh- yeah,” Dave looked a little startled. “You must be… Benny Boy?”

Ben sent Klaus an annoyed look that Klaus pretended not to see by examining invisible dirt under his nails. “Just Ben is more than fine, actually.” He kicked out a leg and clipped Klaus in the shin. He yelped. “Jackass.”

Glaring, Klaus hobbled away from Ben to the other side of the room. Dave watched them, amused. “Fuck off, you undead fuck.” Klaus moved to the door. “How do you feel about popcorn, babe? I make a mean butter and bacon batch, let me tell you, it’s to die for.”

When Klaus made it back to his room after his hunt for popcorn and his acrobatics act to avoid the rest of his siblings, he shouldn’t have been surprised to see the ghosts in his room sitting comfortably together on his furniture, telling each other stories about the Klaus they knew and the differences between them. “He once smashed a snow globe over his head as blackmail,” Ben was saying when Klaus pushed open the door with one hand. Dave was laughing from the bed. “I wanted to kill him. It was so stupid. He didn’t really think it through, but you know, it worked.”

“Oh god,” Klaus said as the realization hit him. He almost dropped his bowl of buttery, cheesy, bacon-loaded popcorn. “I didn’t think this through. My boyfriend and my brother getting along and being alone in the same room. _Fuck_.”

But then it didn’t matter, because Ben was snorting at him and Dave was laughing and suddenly all of Klaus’s troubles began to fade away.

* * *

As Klaus figured out that it took very little energy if any energy at all to sustain Dave’s physical and ghostly form, the same way he did with Ben without even trying, they spent the night in Klaus’s bed, with Ben floating off elsewhere to give them privacy. Klaus woke to the rising sun streaming in through his bedroom window and a body resting beside his in the bed. Two things he wasn’t used to.

Dave had his eyes open and was watching Klaus as he turned over and smiled. “I forgot how pretty you are when you sleep.”

“Creepy,” Klaus joked as he pulled the covers closer around them. Well, just him. Dave didn’t really need it. It was cold, he should have slept in a shirt. “I missed you. So much.”

Something sad glinted in Dave’s eyes as he reached a gentle hand up and placed it on Klaus’s cheek. Klaus nestled into the touch. “I know. I never stopped missing you. I thought about you every moment of every day of every-however-fucking-long it was. I don’t know. All I know was that I wasn’t going to stop until I got back to you.”

Klaus felt tears begin to sting his eyes. “I never stopped loving you, you know? I missed you every single day. I dreamt about you every night. I tried to summon you, to bring you back to me, but it never worked. And you know me. I never put much effort into anything, and I put so much effort into trying to bring you back to me.”

Chuckling lightly under his breath, Dave ran his fingers over Klaus’s face, trying to reacquaint himself with the planes of Klaus’s face, the sharp edges of his cheekbones, the dark circles under his eyes, the extreme paleness of his skin, the smoothness of his lips. He never forgot what his face looked like, but being this close to it, finally being able to touch it again, was something else entirely. Like a man on death row getting his last meal of his choosing before death. Klaus tried to say something, but Dave was lost in the depth of his eyes and didn’t want this moment to end, so he silenced him but pressing their lips together.

He felt like the first breath of air after a lifetime of drowning. He felt like the first smell of spring after months of unstoppable winter. He felt like a good dream after a night of bad ones. He felt like the first ounce of light after an eternity of darkness. He felt like everything that was right and just in the world all at once.

He was everything that Dave never knew he needed and more.

Neither one of them wanted to pull away, but Klaus was running out of breath and neither one of them wanted Klaus to end up in the same situation as Dave and Ben. 'Death by snogging' probably wasn't the best thing to etch onto a tombstone. “You know,” Klaus panted when he finally managed to get some breath back. “I haven’t been kissed since 1968, and I forgot how good you were at it.”

“That’s a shame,” Dave sent Klaus that cocky grin of his and Klaus felt his soul turn to jelly. “And a crime that will never be committed again,” he leant over and kissed up Klaus’s neck to his chin and looked up at him through his eyelashes. “I’ve waited for this moment for a very long time. I’m not about to let you slip away from me again.”

“Me? Slip away?” Klaus laughed, still out of breath. “You’re the one who died. As long as you don’t do that again, I’m sure we’ll be fine.” He looked into Dave’s eyes, so open and honest and loving, and couldn’t help but wonder how someone like Dave could love someone like Klaus. “I love you, you know.”

Dave laughed, a flutter of air against Klaus’s chin that felt as frail as his heart. A side effect of being dead, he decided. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could love anyone as much as I love you, so I think that means I win.”

“Oh god, don’t make this out to be one of those ‘I love you more’ wars,” Klaus snorted. “It’s so cheesy.”

“Well, ‘Cheesy’ _is_ my middle name.”

Klaus made a face. “Dear God, I fucking hope not.”

And then Dave laughed, and for the first time in a very long time, all was right in Klaus’s world, and all of his worries just faded away.


End file.
